Bruce: I am in a Future Studies class where I wrote the following as a research paper. Much of this may come as a surprise to the younger generation and those who were 'not on the bus' at the time; but you and quite a few others will remember and understand what I am talking about. It is still a good idea to see for your self, and not depend on dogma; religious or scientific. Our planet desperately needs intelligent concerned citizens who are well connected and politically savvy. And so with that in mind:

The vast range of problems facing our planet and its dominant specie the human race are apparently much bigger than the average mind can deal with. The expansion of the minds potential to understand and solve problems is the single common denominator in all aspects of our looming difficulties. From endless war to over population to pollution to raising educational outcomes to prison overcrowding to international tensions; every aspect of the human dilemma could be vastly improved. What could possibly contain such a vast potential?

Before LSD became illegal in 1966 hundreds of researchers had been exploring its potentials to increase intelligence, cure alcohol addiction overnight, allow lower dosages of pain medicine, shorten the time for psychotherapeutic breakthroughs, improving creativity, producing religious experience and allowing deep insight into personal areas of expertise. Prisons discovered they could reverse the return rate five years after release from 80% to 20% with a single high dosage session. Languages could be mastered in three weeks. Until the recent rediscovery of MMDA as a therapeutic tool this entire branch of research and medicine has been under legal restrictions. With the return of psychedelic therapies the renewal of society that was aborted in the 6o’s by ultra conservative reactionaries may begin again. Saving the planet will take a rapid radical change in perspective; what psychedelics do best.

After MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, over 80 percent of sufferers from post-traumatic stress disorder no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, as compared to only 25 percent in the control group. This study, just released, was conducted by Michael Mithoefer, M.D. (and his colleagues) and is published in the peer-reviewed “Journal of Psychopharmacology.”

Many school children have been described as having PTSD that severely limits their learning potential due to poverty and inner city life, leading to prison, rehab and continuing poverty for most. Returning veterans are not the only sufferers of trauma. The vast potentials of psychedelic therapy in general such as described by Abraham Maslow in his “Religious Values, and Peak-Experiences” have the potential not only for the individual but for the culture at large; restoring a higher level of functioning and expectation; and possibly even a level of understanding widespread and common enough to produce peace in the Middle East with a renewed perspective on visionary knowledge.

Our current glut of disinfotainment as described by Jean Baudillard in the essays of “Screened Out” imply that this flurry of data is indigestible and producing a severe paralysis of action and understanding. The 85% who claimed their inner voyage the most significant event of their lives; before the mass media barrage began after 1966 inducing paranoia as the most common experience; claimed insights into every realm of knowledge. This digestion of currently indigestible masses of data would seem to answer Baudrillard’s dead end society produced by information clogging the culture with meaninglessness and loss of purpose.

The numerous ways the human brain can be short circuited not only by the neurosis of PTSD but literal brain damage explored by Oliver Sacks in his many books including ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “Hallucinations” are no different than the cultural limitations that John Dewy detailed as the hobbling blocks of education. In his “Education and Experience” the need for a series of real world immersions in triggering curiosity and imagination leading to lifelong self- education does not include psychedelic usage; but likely would have had he lived long enough to see its uses explored as did Timothy Leary in his “Info-Psychology”. Leary described the co evolution of civilization and human potentials as an ever steepening learning curve ultimately leading beyond our solar system and current nervous system programming.

One of the issues that led to the criminalization of an entire class of drugs was its usage by highly energized anti-war protesters during the Vietnam conflict. The hundreds of published research papers were ignored in the Congressional hearings in favor of testimony from Art Cleps and Timothy Leary. That these two gentlemen were not the best representatives at the time as they; like Plato’s cave dwellers exposed to the sun; were clearly raving from their exposer to the Clear Light of LSD. Cleps sang “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat Gently Down the Stream” when first called to testify, and Leary was clearly hyperactive and over exited. The issue of rapid personality change that could alter a lifetime of education overnight became the deciding factor in declaring this entire range of chemicals of no possible medical use. That this very aspect now is being explored as the key to a PTSD cure most certainly will reopen the psychedelic debate for another generation. The potentials are even more critically needed now than fifty years ago as fifty percent of all living things on Earth have been eliminated during that time.

The extreme irony that veterans of America’s longest war may be the ones to see beyond the curse of armed conflict will not escape the historians of the future. Our descendants who will search the sky for the star of their original home planet will likely have Dr. Timothy Leary as a patron hero for his motto: S.M.I.I.L.E.: Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension. The human brain as the ultimate super computer seems almost impossible to contemplate to the current pre psychedelic mass consumer of internet disinfotainment. Perhaps this this same attitude is the root of the sense of helplessness that grips the planets population.

“Science, deprived of its connection with religious faith, has become increasingly technical and “value-free,” while religious commitments, cut loose from their naturalistic moorings, seem increasingly a matter of arbitrary “instincts” or tastes. Worse yet, with global economic and military power concentrating at an unprecedented rate in the hands of a few powerful elites, both faith and reason tend to become tools in the hands of raw, self-aggrandizing power.

“Under these circumstances, the partners to this former marriage, turbulent though it was, cannot help dreaming of a possible reconciliation. Reason could transform the earth, if only science and technology were inspired and guided by a new global morality. Faith would expand and mature, if only the world’s religions addressed themselves to long-term trends in society and nature, and helped to create that global morality.” From Richard Rubenstein "Aristotle's Children"

The religious potential of LSD perhaps was the most critical trigger in its relentless persecution. As Maslow said “Apparently it is one danger of the legalistic and organizational versions of religion that they may tend suppress naturalistic peak-, transcendental, mystical, or other core-religious experiences and to make them less likely to occur, I.E., the degree of religious organization may correlate negatively with the frequency of “religious” experiences. Conventional religions may even be used as defenses against and resistances to the shaking experiences of transcendence.”

“Mumbo Jumbo: From "mama dyambo", in the language of a Mandingo tribe on the Senegal. 1. Among Negroes of the western Sudan, the tutelary genius of a village, represented by a masked man who wards off evil and keeps the women in awe and subjugation. 2. A fetish; a bugaboo. 3. Meaningless incantation; mummery. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1961”

A child, prepared for months by whispered warnings of the coming of a great beast who guides and protects the village, watches in awe and terror as the gigantic creature imprints the values and morals of its tribe. Thus initiated into the young adult portion of its education it awaits the puberty ritual with as much fear as attended the rites of childhood, millennium fever. The "Humanist Manifesto 2000" calls humanity to "embrace its adulthood" and "leave behind the magical thinking and myth-making that are substitutes for tested knowledge of nature." It continues, "As we enter the new millennium, we should not worry about Armageddon, but rather should uncap the tremendous potentialities for human progress in the next century and beyond." A fearful project indeed.

Shamanism inspired state culture religions did not begin with the Christian mythos. Ample evidence exists supporting the conscious creation of theocracies since the dawn of civilization. The Sumerian federation was composed of fifty tribes fused via seven years of ceremonial marriages between tribal deities. Egypt was an amalgamation of twenty-two local river villages bonded by a common synthetic mythology. The Bhramanic civilization of India was founded on symbol manipulation by Aryan invaders from the north. China grew from visions and dreams inspired by diviners and soothsayers. The Incas, Mayans, Olmecs and Aztecs were blatant in the mythic manipulation of their masses. Islam was nearly as transparent in its early history, seeking control of trade routes. Rome was very well aware of the mythic underpinnings of its society at its highest levels just as every other state culture religion. "The Beast that is and is not" has long a hand in the mind of man.

There is nothing new under the sun. With the recent publication of "The Strong Eye of Shamanism, a journey into the caves of consciousness" by Robert E. Ryan Ph.D. the common core of the worlds faiths can at last be discussed in a more fruitful context. Not since G.R. Levy's "Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age, and their influence on European Thought" have the archeological aspects of theology and statecraft been so clearly enunciated. 30,000 years ago in a cave in Lecaux France our ancestors left a testimony of the deep faith that sustained them. That this primordial origin leads directly to our "modern" perspective is an area not commonly explored in forums such as this. I highly recommend the two books listed above to anyone who is truly interested in promoting understanding between various faiths and traditions and bridging the gap between science and religion.

Modern science began with Newton, the last of the alchemists, searching for an explanation of cause at a distance. Today he would likely be searching for the center of gravity of our downward spiraling public discourse; the black hole that spins even the heaviest minds into decaying orbits. Poe in "The Raven" perches a "ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore" on the "pallid bust of Pallas," (Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom. A title honoring her slaying of Pallas, a giant defeated in the war of the Olympians) symbolic irony of the "triumph of reason." Poe having "pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore," was well aware of the mythic underpinnings of Western society. Various birds of prey have long been known to symbolize the shaman. "The chamber door," of the modern perspective is still haunted by the spells of shamans cast thousands of years ago.

Its time for the puberty ritual.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean; 2002 Screened Out; Verso, London, New York

Dewey, John; 1997 Experience and Education; Touchstone, New York New York

Leary, Timothy 1987 Info-Psychology; Falcon Press, Los Angeles & Phoenix

Levy, Gertrude; 1963 Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age and their Influence on European Thought; Harper Torchbook, New York

Maslow, Abraham; 1977 Religions, Values and Peak Experiences; Penguin Books, New York New York

Ryan, Robert; 1999 The Strong Eye of Shamanism; Inner Traditions International, Rochester Vermont

Sacks Oliver; 2012 Hallucinations; Vintage Books, Toronto Canada